carlson-cath and pritchard final
DESCRIPTION
Critique of two perspectives on knowing how from Yuri Cath as well as Duncan Pritchard and J. Adam CarterTRANSCRIPT
Jay CarlsonFr. Murphy-PHIL 450
Seemings and Successful Performance: An Examination of Two
Accounts of Know-how
Broadly construed, the dominant positions in debates over the nature of
know-how and its place in a general account of knowledge are intellectualism
and anti-intellectualism. This paper will examine two positions that are related
but remain aloof to the central tenets of these positions. One of these positions
is the seeming analysis of knowing-how. In his 2011 article “Knowing How
without Knowing That” Yuri Cath wishes to critique the primary positions in the
debate over the relationship between knowing how and knowing that (Cath
2011). He wants to resist, on one side, the intellectualists who claim that
knowing-how can be reduced to some propositional knowledge that something is
the case. Equally though, Cath also wants to reject the variety of accounts in the
tradition of Gilbert Ryle that in various ways construe knowing-how as either a
distinct or even more basic kind of knowledge. Against these two tradtions, Cath
ends by proposing a third alternative that construes knowing-how as a seeming
relation. I will also consider the position of J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard,
who advocate for understanding knowing-how as a particularly robust kind of
cognitive achievement. These two respective positions present knowing-how as
either, as Cath argues, a very minimal and tacit form of knowledge, or, as Carter
and Pritchard argue, as a rather robust and demanding kind of cognitive
achievement.
In this paper, I will begin with an attempt to spell out in more detail how to
understand the seeming relation Cath proposes. From this explication I hope to
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delineate some of the significant problems for the seeming analysis. I will then
move to an exposition of Carter and Pritchard’s proposed variant of knowing-how
qua cognitive achievement, as well as some of the problems inherent to this
approach.
I will begin by showing what motivates Cath’s development of the seeming
analysis. Intellectualists—here represented by Jason Stanley and Timothy
Williamson (Stanley and Williamson 2001)—claim that knowing-how ascriptions
are true just in cases where, for some subject S and some act Φ, there is some
way w to Φ and S knows-that w is a way for her1 to Φ. In other words, a subject
must assent to a proposition that a certain way is how she might perform a given
act. For instance, one knows how to ride a bicycle just in cases where one
knows that a particular way of operating a bicycle is how one is able to
competently ride a bicycle. This account of knowing-how is intended to avoid
ascribing knowledge-how in two kinds of scenarios. The first kind is one where a
person is able to perform an action correctly but either does not understand what
she was doing during the performance or luckily happens upon the correct
performance. Stanley and Williamson think that it is intuitive to deny knowing-
how in cases where an agent luckily stumbles on the correct performance without
grasping why or how that performance was correct. The second kind of case
1 It is important that the agent’s consideration of the proposition w is a way to is Φtaken under a “practical mode of presentation” meaning that the way is taken from the first person perspective, as being a way for this agent herself to . As Yuri Cath Φnotes that the practical mode of presentation is Stanley and Williamson’s way of traversing from the intellectual aspect of the proposition under consideration to its practical, action-guiding aspect (Cath 2011, 133-4 note 20). This consideration under practical mode of presentation will obviously be connected to various dispositional states, but it is not reducible to them (Stanley and Williamson 2001, 429-430).
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they consider is one where an expert at a particular act becomes disabled such
that she is unable to perform the action she previously did expertly. Here, the
intellectualists want to say that it seems intuitive that we can ascribe know-how to
the disabled expert even though she is unable to perform the particular action in
question (Stanley and Williamson 2001, 416). The reason they can attribute
knowing-how to the latter case and not the former is that the disabled expert is
aware of the way in which the action can be competently performed, especially
for her (her disability notwithstanding). More precisely she believes the
proposition that there is a way for her to perform said action. The upshot of this
is that although some might think that knowing-how and knowing-that are very
distinct kinds of knowing, Stanley and Williamson assert that in fact knowing-how
is simply a species of knowing-that.
Yuri Cath critiques this position by providing a case where intuitively a
subject knows how to perform a particular action but lacks the sort of
propositional knowledge the intellectualist think is necessary for knowing-how.
He gives the case of the person, Charlie, who finds a manual with correct
instructions on how to install a light bulb. Charlie grasps the instructions perfectly
and successfully knows-how to install a light bulb. However, the author of this
manual was malicious and intentionally mis-described how to perform the stated
task. A computer glitch at the printing company, however, caused the author’s
false instructions to be replaced with correct instructions in only in the copy,
which happened to be the one that Charlie consulted. The import of this case is
that while it seems clear that Charlie knows-how to screw in a light bulb, his
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knowledge-that the instructions in the manual are the way to install a light bulb is
undermined since they are accidentally true (Cath 2011, 117). Thus, Cath
argues, Charlie seems to be an instance where one can have knowledge-how
without the attendant propositional knowledge the intellectualists think is
necessary, demonstrating that the intellectualist’s claim that all knowing-how is
knowing-that is false.
Cath finds himself in agreement with other critics of the intellectualist
account, namely the anti-intellectualist and neo-Ryleans. Figures in these camps
understand knowing-how either in terms of possessing a complex set of
dispositions or in terms of the ability to perform said action. Yet Cath resists the
Rylean-inspired class of positions because of cases like “the salchow case”
raised by John Bengson and Marc Moffett (Bengson and Moffett 2011, 182).
This case illustrates that one can have the ability to Φ without knowing how to Φ.
An ice skater, Irina, has a mistaken conception that to perform a figure skating
move known as the salchow is to take off on the outside edge of her skate and
land on the inside edge of the other skate, when in fact the move is correctly
performed in the opposite order. However, Irina has a neurological disorder that
causes her to perform the move correctly in spite of her mistaken belief about the
way to perform it (Cath 2011, 129). The lesson drawn from this case is
disputable, but Cath takes the meaning to be that since the ice skater’s intention
and what she thinks she is doing when she performs the salchow are not
causally related to her successful performance, we cannot truly say that she
knows-how to perform a salchow. He takes both this salchow case and the
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disabled expert (mentioned earlier with Stanley and Williamson) as convincing
counterexamples to the Rylean inspired positions, as they illustrate that
successful performance is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowing-how (Cath
2011, 132).
Having found both the intellectualist and the Rylean accounts of
knowing-how inadequate, Cath ends his article by briefly sketching out a possible
third alternative he terms “the Seeming analysis.” On this account, S knows how
to Φ just in case there is some way w that seems to S like a way for S to Φ.
Cath’s proposal is that the seeming relation is not a belief relation, thus
distinguishing it from the intellectualist requirement that there be a belief that
some w is a way for S to Φ. Cath takes this account of knowing how to be
superior because it can accommodate both the intuitions of the lucky light bulb
and salchow cases, where what seems to be a way to perform an action is either
accidentally true or false, respectively (Cath 2011, 134).
The seeming relations Cath provides is only briefly sketched, so it bears
exploring the sources he draws on to fully understand the proposal. In a footnote
to this passage, he specifies that he understands the relevant seemings as
nonperceptual, nonoccurrent states wherein there is a disposition that for some S
some w seems like a way to Φ (Cath 2011, 133 note 19). He mentions that his
account parallels David Hunter’s account (Hunter 1998) of the relationship
between linguistic understanding and dispositions to understand. Hunter argues
that while a subject’s linguistic faculties and her dispositions to understand can
be understood as states of belief, that does not entail that the occurrent states of
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understanding are likewise states of beliefs (Hunter 1998, 565). On the same
analogy, Cath wants to say that though a seeming can lead one to having a
corresponding belief—and certainly a bevy of dispositions as well—it is not itself
a belief. Though Cath wants to distinguish the seeming relation as a state where
“For S it seems to be that p” from the state where “S believes that p,” he notes
that this distinction is consistent with seeming consisting in an inclination or
disposition to believe (Cath 2011, 133 note 18). Yet he also draws on George
Bealer’s account of intellectual seemings that are defeasible, such that the
Müller-Lyer figure can seem to be lines of two different lengths even if one knows
that they are (Bealer 1992). This allows his account to accommodate cases
where a subject can perform an act but whose way by which one would perform
the act is false or undermined.
In a way, Cath’s account can be seen as an understanding of knowledge-
how as a form of tacit knowledge. Though Cath does not cite him as inspiration
for the seeming analysis Jerry Fodor presents a defense of an understanding of
know-how as tacit knowledge in his 1968 paper “The appeal to tacit knowledge in
psychological explanation.” Fodor notes that anti-intellectualists would cite as
evidence against the intellectualist position the findings of cognitive psychology
that much of the causes our behavior are not reportable or easily accessed from
the subject perspective. If the intellectualist requires that an agent use or have
access to some internal instructions or rules for her to know-how, then many
intuitive cases of knowing-how would be dismissed as false. Fodor thinks that
the anti-intellectualists present the intellectualist claim as much stronger than it
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needs to be. Fodor thinks that the anti-intellectualists conflate a performer’s
knowing-how with her providing an account or explanation of how she performs
that task (Fodor 1968, 634). He points out that there are plenty of cases where
knowing-how and explaining can come apart. Higher animals and preverbal
toddlers know how to perform tasks without any ability to explain their actions,
and many typists can competently use a keyboard without any explicit knowledge
of where the specific keys are. For Fodor, such cases would demonstrate latent
forms of knowing operative in a performer of which she is either unaware or
unable to explain her performance (Fodor 1968, 631). The intellectualist position
does not require that the knowledge of how or why a subject is acting be
available or even directly articulable to her; rather Fodor thinks that the
intellectualist is minimally committed to saying that when an agent acts she is
acting according to some rule, even if it is latent or tacit for her (Fodor 1968,
636). If there is a set S of tasks which are constitutive of performing some Φ and
a sufficient answer to the question “How does one Φ?” then S constitutes the
relevant agent’s tacit knowledge-how (Fodor 1968, 638). While Fodor and
Cath’s approach to know-how are not completely parallel, we can certainly see
Cath’s seeming analysis does not require that the agent is necessarily in a
position to explain or articulate why w seems like a way for her to Φ.
One preliminary objection to the seeming analysis is that it does not seem
to be an adequate description of many cases of knowing-how. One way to
illustrate this putative inadequacy is it seems to run afoul of the “assert the
stronger” principle. In the ethics of belief literature, the “assert the stronger”
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principle is that one should assert the strongest justified attitude one has for a
claim (Chignell 2013). On this rule one should not assert that one merely
believes p if one has a justified belief or has knowledge that p. In the present
context of know-how, then, there are cases where it seems intuitive to say that a
performer’s know-how regarding some Φ is more than just that there seems to be
a way for her to Φ. The principal cases in mind would be instances of expert
know-how. Intuitively the expert football player who knows-how to perform
corner kicks well has more than just a way that seems like a way for him to
perform that action. One might understand this to say that he has greater
subjective confidence that the way it seems for him to perform corner kicks is in
fact a way to perform corner kicks, or that his seeming is less likely to be subject
to defeaters like distortions and biases such that what seems to him is not
actually way to perform corner kicks. However one describes this state, it hardly
seems plausible that the most justified attitude about an expert subject in these
cases is just that S has a way w that seems like a way for S to Φ.
Another objection to Cath’s account is that what seems to be the case for
some subject does not offer a very firm grounding for claims about what that
subject knows. The importance of this point for knowing-how should be noted.
Results from cognitive psychology have demonstrated that our reasoning
faculties are riven with all manner of heuristics and biases that affect our
perception of how the world around us works. This general point appears to be
particularly relevant for cases where one seems to know-how to Φ: the fact that
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w seems like a way for a subject to Φ is not much evidence in itself that w is in
fact a way to Φ.
Of course, Cath grants that seemings relations are defeasible, as he cites
the apparent difference Müller-Lyer figures and the apparent truth of naïve set
theory as instances where apparent seemings are false. The same would be
true of seemings for knowing-how. His initial sketch of the seeming analysis
does include that there is some true way to Φ that the subject is aware of (Cath
2011, 133). Recall as well that he denies know-how to the figure skater who has
a wrong seeming of how to perform a salchow (Cath 2011, 128).
Yet here we might ask if having a true seeming that w is a way to Φ is
sufficient for knowing-how. This leads us to consider possible Gettier cases for
Cath’s seeming cases, where the agent meets the stipulated conditions for
knowing-how but intuitively fails to attain knowledge-how. Stanley and
Williamson give an instance of a novice pilot in a flight simulator as a candidate
Gettier case for knowing-how. Bob the novice pilot is being instructed by Henry
on how to fly a plane in the flight simulator. Unbeknownst to Bob, Henry is a
malicious instructor and intends to give Bob wrong instructions about how to fly a
plane. He has inserted a randomizing device in the simulator’s controls to further
disrupt Bob’s simulation. The randomizer happens to malfunction, however, and
as a result Henry’s instructions turn out to be precisely the correct directions for
flying a plane. Bob follows these instructions and successfully completes the
simulation. Stanley and Williamson claim that even though Bob has a justified
true belief about how to fly a plane, he does not know how to fly a plane (Stanley
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and Williamson 2001, 435). We can modify the original example to Cath’s
seeming analysis that Bob has way w that seems like a way for him to fly a
plane, but he does not know how to fly a plane.
Cath pushes against Stanley and Williamson’s analysis, noting that it is
“simply wrong” about Bob not knowing how to fly a plane (Cath 2011, 125). If
there was another pilot, Joe, who successfully completed the same flight
simulator by following the same advice that was given to Bob except that Joe
received it from an intentionally benevolent instructor, we would clearly say that
Joe knows how to fly a plane. Cath claims that if Joe has know-how in this case,
then so does Bob.
Presumably Cath would say the same thing with the flight simulator case
modified to his seeming analysis. If there is a way to fly a plane and it seems to
Bob that that way is how to fly a plane, then Cath would say that Bob knows how
to fly a plane. But Cath’s proposed analysis misses a crucial feature of what
makes Bob’s case intuitively one of actual know-how. It is not just that he has a
true way that seems like the way for him to fly a plane, but also that he was
successful as a result of acting on that true seeming. These two features are not
included in Cath’s analysis. Suppose that Henry gave Bob the correct
instructions for how to fly a plane but also slipped him a drug that caused him to
not act in accord with the directions. While in the simulation, it seems to Bob like
the instructions are in fact a way for him to fly a plane, all while not noticing that
he is acting totally out of sync with the instructions given. Some unrelated fluke
in the simulation causes him to successfully complete the mission.
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I think that it is quite clear in this modified case that Bob does not know
how to fly a plane. That the instructions seemed to Bob like a way for him to fly a
plane was not the cause of Bob’s successful completion of the simulation. The
disruption between Bob’s true seeming and the successful outcome was that his
behavior was neither in accord with the true instructions nor causally related to
the successful outcome. In this light we do not even need an extravagant drug
scenario to illustrate the insufficiency of seeming analysis for knowing how: if
Bob was given the correct instructions which seem to him like a way for him to fly
a plane, but he performs the wrong actions due just to his own sheer
incompetence, it is clear that he does not know how to fly a plane. A possible
response is for Cath is to focus on the claim, drawn from William Tolhurst
(Tolhurst 1998), that seemings include some kind of inclination or disposition to
act or even believe in a particular way (Cath 2011, 133 note 18). But this would
be tantamount to conceding the force of the seemings analysis: they are only
important for understanding knowing-how in what other states they bring about,
not in themselves. Even under the most ideal conditions the seeming is at best
only a contributing factor to a subject’s knowing-how.
If we are right to see Cath’s seeming analysis of know-how as giving
insufficient attention to the performance involved in know-how, then we are lead
quite naturally to consider the anti-intellectualist accounts that indeed focus on
the performed actions when demonstrating know-how. In this tradition, Ted
Poston succinctly describes know-how as the successful display of skill, and that
“if one can intelligently and successfully Φ” then one knows how to Φ (Poston
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2009, 744). An important and critical development of the anti-intellectualist
tradition is the account given by J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard. The
remainder of this paper will focus on their account. They want to argue that
knowing-how in its essence is some kind of cognitive achievement2 (Carter and
Pritchard 2013, 13). On this account, a subject knows-how to Φ just in cases
when her Φ’ing can be legitimately credited to her.
Though Carter and Pritchard are anti-intellectualists, they note from the
outset the inadequacy of the dominant neo-Rylean understanding of knowing-
how simply in terms successful performance. The problem with this account is
that the success of a performance might have little to do with the competence or
skill of the agent in question. A person might make a lucky shot or some fluke
event in the environment might be the cause a successful performance. For
example, suppose a skillful archer fires an arrow at a target and one fluke gust of
wind blows it off course but another gust of wind in the opposite direction blows it
back on track so that it successfully hits the bullseye. Even if we stipulate that
the archer skillfully fired the bow, Carter and Pritchard would point out that
manifested skill was not directly causally related to the successful outcome 2 The notion of creditworthiness is also a likely theoretical cost for the seeming analysis. Since seeming is not something that is likely under volitional control, it is hard to see how a seeming relationship would be something that could plausibly credited to the agent in question. Though the focus on the achievement or credit of agent’s know-how is strongly defended in the anti-intellectualist tradition, knowing-how as an achievement cuts across the intellectualist/anti-intellectualist distinction. Julia Annas, for instance, holds a kind of intellectualist position that the rational achievement of agents is not solely in successful performances, but rather in an agent’s internal “fact-oriented states” (Annas 2001, 244). Likewise, John Bengson and Marc Moffet take the cognitive achievement element of knowing-how as one of the central explanada of their nonpropositional intellectualism (Bengson and Moffett 2011, 165).
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because of the fluky counteracting gusts. In most counterfactual scenarios
where those gusts do not intervene on the situation, the archer would fail to hit
her target. Instead Carter and Pritchard want to say that it’s not just that the
agent demonstrated skill nor that she attained the outcome she intended, but
rather that the successful outcome was the result of her demonstrated skill.3
But if luck could undermine the achievement status of just a successful
performance, why could luck not could also undermine the achievement of the
performances whose success are because of the ability of the performers in
question? Here Carter and Pritchard want to make a distinction between two
different kinds of luck: intervening and environmental. Intervening luck is the
kind of luck that manifests itself between the skillful ability and the successful
outcome, as the gusts of wind intervened between the archer’s firing and the
arrow hitting the target in the previous example (Carter and Pritchard 2013, 4).
Carter and Pritchard admit that intervening luck does undermine the achievement
status of a performance. But suppose that there is no intervening luck on an
action but some aspect of the environment in which the performance takes place
is still fluky or lucky. To give a variant on the archer case mentioned above,
suppose that the archer hits the bullseye at a moment when there were no gusts
of wind to blow the arrow off course, but the could have been gusts. It is still
true that the circumstances of this shot were lucky, as fluky gusts could very
easily have blow the arrow off course and made the performance a failure.
3 Note the similarities between this view and Sosa’s virtue epistemology of an apt belief that is accurate because it was aptly formed or utilized (Sosa 2007, 23).
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In cases like this, Carter and Pritchard want to claim that environmental
but non-intervening luck does not undermine achievement like intervening luck
does. Their reasoning is that the success of the performance in these cases is
the direct causal result of the agent’s ability—which is not true in intervening luck
cases—even though it was lucky in the sense that it happened to not be
interfered with in any way (Carter and Pritchard 2013, 4).
Carter and Pritchard note that while environmental luck does not
undermine knowledge-how achievements, the same is not true of knowledge-
that. Consider the standard case of perceiving a real barn in fake barn country.
If one is in fake barn country one is not justified in believing that one is looking at
a barn even if one happens to be looking at a genuine barn. In this case, even
though the luck is not directly intervening between the subject and the object,
nevertheless the knowledge-that the subject perceives a barn is undermined by
the unfavorable conditions of the environment (Carter and Pritchard 2013, 6)
Carter and Pritchard even use a variant of Cath’s lucky light bulb case to
illustrate their point about how environmental luck does not eliminate knowing-
how. Suppose that Charlie consulted a bookshelf full of various manuals for how
to screw in a light bulb. He chooses one that provides the correct instructions,
allowing him to successfully learn how to screw in a light bulb. As it turns out
however, all of the other manuals on that shelf were the product of malicious
authors who intentionally misdescribed how to install a light bulb. By chance,
though, Charlie happened to select the one book that gave genuine, accurate
instructions; e then is able to successfully change a light bulb. Carter and
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Pritchard claim that while it is not obvious in the original case Cath gives that
Charlie knows how to screw in a light bulb when he consults the fluky manual—
while he can certainly successfully change a bulb, whether he knows-how a bit
muddier—it seems like he does know how to screw in a light bulb when he
consults a genuine manual that happens to be surrounded by fakes (Carter and
Pritchard 2013, 11).
Serious questions arise when one tries to use Carter and Pritchard’s
formulation of know-how to answer the difficult cases that opponents of anti-
intellectual raise such as the Salchow performer and disabled violinist cases. Of
the two, the answer Carter and Pritchard would give for the salchow case seems
like the more straightforward. Carter and Pritchard deny that the person in the
salchow case has know-how, since the intervening luck of the correcting
neurological disorder is what actually causes her to perform the move
successfully. Carter and Pritchard point out in a footnote that it is “not at all
obvious that Irina is performing the Salchow intelligently.” since her cognitive
disorder is more the cause of her performing the correct sequence of steps
(Carter and Pritchard 2013, 17). In an important sense therefore she is not the
one who is really responsible for her successful performance of the salchow.
Since she plausibly fails two criteria, it seems more than reasonable to deny that
she has knowledge-how.
This does raise the question of how Carter and Pritchard conceive of
intelligence what precisely it consists in. For them, intelligence is a property of
acts that are directed by knowing-how (Carter and Pritchard 2014, 17 note 24).
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In itself this definition is standard fare for an anti-intellectualist position. But I
think it is worth pointing out that Carter and Pritchard’s account requires that an
intelligent action involved with knowing-how must also be connected with
successful performance in the right way. They cannot be just happen to be
conjunctively true. But in the case of Irina, though she does execute a salchow
successfully, she does not perform the act intelligently because, properly
speaking, it is her neurological malady and not Irina herself who is responsible
for the successful performance.
The more challenging case for Carter and Pritchard however is the
disabled expert violinist. An virtuoso violinist is in a tremendous accident that
causes her to lose the use of her fingers. Intuitively we don’t want to say that this
disability has any effect on her know-how regarding how to play the violin; yet if
Carter and Pritchard take successful performance caused by ability as the
standard for know-how and the violinist is unable to perform the task at all, then
she is unable to meet the necessary conditions for know-how. Furthermore, the
problem in this case is not a fluky intervening luck between the skill and
successful performance, but one where some tragic luck cut short the ability
altogether. One response might be that we could say that the disabled expert
knows how to play the violin in a residual, backward-looking sense that she used
to know-how to play a violin; but this response simply avoids the claim under
consideration, that she retains this know-how in her present condition.
Another response might be to take performance in a much broader, more
flexible sense than Carter and Pritchard might originally conceive. One of Carter
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and Pritchard’s significant influences is Ernest Sosa. In his book A Virtue
Epistemology, Sosa mentions that a virtuous performance involves “the agent’s
constitution and his situation” (Sosa 2007, 81). One possible way to understand
what Sosa says here is that the performance involved can vary according the
capacities that the subject has available to her. So if playing the violin is not
something that the expert violinist is able to do because of her situation with her
disability, then perhaps there could be a different kind of performance wherein
she might manifest her knowing-how. Another possibility along these lines might
be the response from another anti-intellectualist, Stephen Hetherington. On his
account, knowing-how just is “the ability to manifest various accurate
representations” of the performance in question (Hetherington 2006, 86). So
even if a person is disabled and thus incapable of performing an act as such,
they are still able to realize that knowledge in a variety of different ways
commensurate with their capacities and impairments, e.g., by being able to
describe how one performs the act, by contemplating the act of playing, by
correcting and teaching other performers, etc. And while obviously Carter and
Pritchard would not accept Hetheringtons’ overall account of what constitutes
knowing how, perhaps they could make use of the apparent flexibility of his
account of performance.
Is there sufficient flexibility in Carter and Pritchard’s notion of performance
such that they can say that the disabled violinist could manifest her know-how
even though she can no longer play the violin? Put another way, could know-how
be multiply-realized? For Carter and Pritchard it is difficult to say; from the their
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own articles it is unclear what exactly they take performance to be, so it is hard to
determine whether they could accommodate a kind of know-how that ϕ could be
multiply realized by various distinct performances other than the literal ϕ’ing.
One reason to be skeptical about this possible approach is that it could be
possible that the abilities required in ϕ’ing are not necessarily identical with
abilities to perform other action, even ones peripherally related to ϕ’ing. In the
present case a violinist with irreparably damaged fingers might be able to
manifest some measure of her expertise in teaching others to play, critiquing
performances, or authoring books on playing the violin, etc. But these would be
distinct performances from actually playing the violin, and each of them would
require a skillset distinct from what a virtuoso violinist would have qua violinist.
Though the set of skills involved in each performance would certainly have some
overlap with each other, but they would almost certainly not be identical. All of
this is to say that it is not necessarily true that an expert violinist would be
manifesting the same expertise qua violin instructor as she would qua violinist.
So even if Carter and Pritchard take this proposed route, it is not clear that know-
how could be multiply realized in different kinds of performances in a way that
one could ascribe know-how to the disabled violinist.
In this paper I have demonstrated the insufficiency of Cath’s proposed
seeming analysis of knowing-how and expressed some less certain but serious
reservations about Carter and Pritchard’s account of knowing-how as a kind of
cognitive achievement. In doing so I am left in a precarious spot. On the one
hand, the problem with the seeming analysis is that it did not pay sufficient
Carlson 19
attention to the actual performance involved in know-how; but the know-how qua
cognitive achievement position became problematic because it might be tied too
rigidly to performance that manifest ϕ, which would require that one deny know-
how to those who cannot perform said actions. What then shall we say? I think
the takeaway from this discussion is that we can see some of the kinds of
features we want our account of knowing-how to have. I think Carter and Pri
tchard are correct to say that successful performance linked in the right way to
one’s cognitive abilities is a desirable aspect of knowing-how and an important
improvement over the standard account given by the anti-intellectualists. On the
other hand, our account of successful performance needs to be sufficiently
flexible to accommodate cases like the disabled violinist. Figuring how to
construe performance in a more flexible way will require further investigation.
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Works Cited
Julia Annas (2001). Moral knowledge as practical knowledge. Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (02):236-256.
George Bealer (1992). The incoherence of empiricism. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 66:99-138.
John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett (2011). Nonpropositional Intellectualism. In John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett (eds.), Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action. Oxford University Press. 161-195.
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